John Salt
| John Salt | |
|---|---|
| Born |
2 August 1937 Birmingham, England |
| Nationality | English |
| Education | Birmingham School of Art Slade School of Art Maryland Institute College of Art |
| Known for | Painting |
| Movement | Photorealism |
John Salt (born 2 August 1937) is an English artist, whose greatly detailed paintings from the late 1960s onwards made him one of the pioneers of the photorealist school.
Although Salt's work has developed through several distinct phases, it has generally focussed on images of cars, often shown wrecked or abandoned within a suburban or semi-rural American landscape, with the banality and dishevelment of the subject matter contrasting with the immaculate and meticulous nature of the work's execution.
Salt was born and brought up in the Sheldon district of Birmingham. His father was a motor repair garage owner, whose stepfather in turn had been a signwriter painting stripes on the bodies of cars. As a young boy Salt was encouraged to draw and paint, and at the age of fifteen he gained admittance to the Birmingham School of Art, where he studied from 1952 to 1958. From 1958 until 1960 he studied at the Slade School of Art in London, where he was particularly influenced by the work of the English artist Prunella Clough and American Pop Art figures such as Robert Rauschenberg.
Salt returned to the Midlands to teach at Stourbridge College of Art and in 1964 was the first artist to exhibit at Birmingham's newly opened Ikon Gallery, where he had his first one-man show in 1965. In 1966 he married and decided to move to the United States, applying to numerous American art colleges for work before eventually being accepted by Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where he was offered a place in 1967 on a Master of Fine Arts programme with associated teaching work.
Salt's work at this time showed influences of both abstract expressionism and Pop Art – the two pre-eminent artistic movements of the time. Unhappy at the prospect of merely selecting which of a pre-existing set of styles he was to adopt, however, Salt sought a more distinct artistic identity and was encouraged to explore a wide variety of styles and techniques by Grace Hartigan, who was the head of the graduate programme at Baltimore and a major influence on Salt's early career.
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